Newsdesk Archive

It is not just the pollution caused by traffic that is affecting our health, but also the noise according to a new European study, which found that exposure to excessive traffic noise is linked to a higher risk of heart disease.

Every day you wake up with a slightly less connected brain than the night before. New research in mice reveals that during sleep the connections between brain cells, which hold information learned throughout the day, undergo massive shrinkage. The process makes room for learning new memories while shedding weak ones. As author Marie Kondo would put it, this is the brain's very own “life-changing magic of tidying up.”

Hitting the snooze button at weekends to make up for early starts during the week may be doing more harm than good. Social jetlag – which occurs when your work and social commitments conflict with your innate desire to sleep at certain times – may increase your risk of heart disease.

Health professionals are sounding the alarm over the heightened risk of death linked to the use of psychiatric drugs, which was highlighted in a pair of Vancouver-based studies published this month.

Researchers make the case for a new, psychedelics-only controlled substance category To do science on humans with illegal substances, researches are required to submit a proposal to an institutional review board, which is supposed to ensure the experiment is both ethical and safe. Given the taboo surrounding psychedelics and universities' tendency to avoid controversy, even the safest and most well-designed studies may flounder on the shores of a dean's idea of what constitutes respectable science. Related: 9 Millionth Study Confirms that Psilocybin is the Safest Recreational Drug

California police officers speak less respectfully to members of the public who are black than to those who are white, researchers studying body camera footage say.

As recounted by author and journalist Daniel P. Mannix, during the European witch craze the Duke of Brunswick in Germany invited two Jesuit scholars to oversee the Inquisition's use of torture to extract information from accused witches.

It’s hard to avoid invisible wounds from the blast force of a divorce. But how gracefully parents navigate the emotional rubble afterward can determine the extent of some of their children’s injuries—particularly those to their immune systems.

A recent study conducted at Baycrest Health Sciences has uncovered a crucial piece into why playing a musical instrument can help older adults retain their listening skills and ward off age-related cognitive declines. This finding could lead to the development of brain rehabilitation interventions through musical training.

In a pair of studies, scientists explored how the human brain stores and retrieves memories. One study suggests that the brain etches each memory into unique firing patterns of individual neurons. Meanwhile, the second study suggests that the brain replays memories faster than they are stored.

Scientists in the US have accurately reconstructed images of human faces by monitoring the responses of monkey brain cells. The brains of primates can resolve different faces with remarkable speed and reliability, but the underlying mechanisms are not fully understood.

Ravens and other members of the corvid family (crows, jays, and magpies) are known to be intelligent. They can remember individual human faces, expertly navigate human environments (like trash cans), and they even hold funerals for their dead. Some ravens, it seems, even know the art of making a deal. A new paper published in the journal Animal Behavior tested how well a raven could judge a deal that was "fair" or "unfair." Alt: Ravens remember when they have been swindled: The clever birds have the human-like ability to recognise and avoid people who have tricked them

Long-term observations of wild equines reveal a host of unexpected behaviors Some time around 35,000 years ago, when much of Europe was locked up in sheets of ice, an artist acquired a bit of mammoth ivory and began carving. A masterpiece emerged in the form of a two-inch-long horse. Its magnificently arched stallion's neck combines muscular potency and natural grace. Its head, slightly cocked, gives the animal an air of deep contemplation. One can almost hear him snort and see him toss his head, warning rivals to take care. No one knows who created this miniature marvel, dubbed the “Vogelherd horse” after the cave in Germany in which it was found, but it is clear that this ivory carver spent a lot of time watching wild horses, studying their social interactions and learning their body language. From The Horse: The Epic History of Our Noble Companion

Chimpanzees share our human ability to amass knowledge, a new study led by a University of St Andrews researcher has found. The ability to achieve great feats by building on the work of others is known as cumulative culture. Until now humans, baboons, and pigeons were the only species thought to be capable of it.

A Sumatran rhino that symbolized the power of social media to potentially save wildlife was euthanized Sunday in Malaysia. Puntung, a 20-year-old female, succumbed to cancer. She was one of three remaining Sumatran rhinos in the country.

In 2016, 33 lions freed from circuses in Peru and Colombia were transported to South Africa to live out their days in a wildlife refuge. Last week, poachers broke into the sanctuary, killing two of the big cats.

What do goats and squirrels have in common? They both climb trees, of course. While squirrels live amongst the branches, goats, or at least those in arid regions, climb them for dinner. And that’s good for the goats, and the trees.

The emerging field of plasmonics could bring advances in chemical manufacturing, usher in new clean and sustainable technologies and desalination systems to avert a future global water crisis. Plasmonic materials contain features, patterns or elements that enable unprecedented control of light by harnessing clouds of electrons called surface plasmons.

Using Earth-abundant materials, EPFL scientists have built the first low-cost system for splitting CO2 into CO, a reaction necessary for turning renewable energy into fuel.

Contamination of marine and terrestrial ecosystems by microplastics is putting individual organisms at risk. The effects of plastic pollution in terrestrial environments remain largely unknown. To date, the majority of research has focused on aquatic systems, as 10 million to 20 million tons of plastic litter find their way to the oceans each year.

Imagine being a scuba diver and leaving your air tank behind you on a dive. That's essentially what humans are doing as we expand our footprint on the planet without paying adequate attention to impacts on other living things, according to researchers. Both ominous and hopeful, a new report paints a picture of the value of biodiversity, the threats it faces and the window of opportunity we have to save species before it's too late.

The "clean energy economy" always seems to be a few steps away but never quite here. Most energy for transportation, heating and cooling and manufacturing is still delivered using fossil fuel inputs. But with a few scientific breakthroughs, hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe, could be the energy carrier of a future clean energy society. Taking one step closer toward the elusive goal, a team of scientists from Penn State and Florida State University have developed a lower cost and industrially scalable catalyst to produce pure hydrogen through a low-energy water-splitting process.

Everything we know about Venus and Mars points to an early environment that was hospitable for life, says Grinspoon, a senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute. But somehow only Earth held onto its water, and eventually burst out with the self-sustaining fire of life.

Ancient Mars’s lakes may have had two habitable zones. A study of mudstones in Gale crater shows that the lake that once resided there was split into distinct layers: one closer to the water’s edges and surface, and another deeper down. Both had everything a microbe needs to survive.

Much of the Martian surface appears pock-marked. At the southern polar region, frozen carbon dioxide converted into its gaseous state under the Martian summer sun creates a Swiss cheese landscape. Astronomers have had images showing this pattern for about 10 years. But in a new, late-summer image of the planet's southern hemisphere, a deeper-than-normal hole stands out. The feature is hundreds of yards wide and unlike anything in its surroundings. Alt: Mystery Hole on Mars’ South Pole

Gale Crater, the site being explored by the Curiosity rover, was chosen as a landing site because its structure and composition suggested that it might preserve information about Mars' past. As Curiosity climbed the slopes of the crater's central peak, various discoveries have clearly indicated that Mars had a watery past.

A new study led by Northern Illinois University geography professor Wei Luo calculates the amount of water needed to carve the ancient network of valleys on Mars and concludes the Red Planet's surface was once much more watery than previously thought.

As the Fermi paradox states, the Universe is a vast, unknowable space, filled with trillions upon trillions of potentially habitable planets, so... where are all the aliens? In the latest attempt to solve this conundrum, a trio of researchers have suggested that advanced alien civilisations have gone into self-imposed 'hibernation' - waiting for a future where the Universe is far colder than it is now, which would facilitate the kind of processing power we could only ever dream about. Alt: Aliens May Be Hibernating Until the Universe Cools Down

Researchers have announced the third detection of gravitational waves—ripples in the fabric of space and time. Albert Einstein predicted gravitational waves as part of his theory of general relativity more than 100 years ago, but it has taken astrophysicists more than 50 years of trial and error to find the direct evidence to support his theory.

Scientists have long tried to explain the origin of a mysterious, large and anomalously cold region of the sky. In 2015, they came close to figuring it out as a study showed it to be a “supervoid” in which the density of galaxies is much lower than it is in the rest of the universe. However, other studies haven’t managed to replicate the result.

Due to advances in technology, scientists have been keeping an eye out for signs of alien megastructures. One scientist hypothesizes that, if such a megastructure exists, it would be around a pulsar instead of a star.

It is no easy thing to search for signs of intelligent life beyond our Solar System. In addition to the incredible distances involved and the fact that we really only have indirect methods at our disposal, there is also the small problem of not knowing exactly what to look for. If intelligent life does exist beyond our Solar System, would they even communicate as we do, using radio transmitters and similar forms of technology?

Researchers have found a way around one of nanotechnology's biggest stumbling block in developing workable nanabots. They created artificial nanoparticles that can communicate with each other using chemical signals.

Decision-making is typically thought of as something done by intelligent living things and, in modern times, computers. But over the past several years, researchers have demonstrated that physical objects such as a metal bar [video], liquids [paper], and lasers can also "make decisions" by responding to feedback from their environments. And they have shown that, in some cases, physical objects can potentially make decisions faster and more accurately than what both humans and computers are capable of.

Consumers should consider going organic because pesticides on foods are far more dangerous than was thought, causing damage to the human brain, a major study suggests.

Retreating glaciers have left villages in Ladakh with acute water shortages. Local engineer Sonam Wangchuk, noticing one day how ice under a bridge stayed frozen even in summer, came up with a solution as ingenious as it is beautiful

An expanse of ice roughly the size of Delaware is close to breaking off from the warming Antarctic ice shelf to form one of the world's largest-ever icebergs, scientists said Thursday.

Call it the largest fart in Earth’s history. As the most recent ice age came to a close 12,000 years ago, retreating glaciers in the Barents Sea north of Norway triggered unprecedented blowouts of methane gas from massive dome-like features on the seabed.

To find a month when the global average temperature over the land and oceans was below average, you have to go all the way back to December 1984, according to the latest monthly analysis from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

By swapping solar photovoltaics for coal, the US could prevent 51,999 premature deaths a year, potentially making as much as $2.5 million for each life saved. Related: China Will Make as Much Clean Electricity by 2030 as the U.S. Does From All Sources Today

The largest floating solar power plant in the world is now online in China. Floating where coal used to be mined, the installation is helping China transition toward renewables and making the most of its surroundings.

The world's first commercial facility that can extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and resell it for commercial purposes opened May 31 in Switzerland. This technology could help cut 1 percent of global fossil fuel emissions by 2025, according to the company that developed the new system. Alt: A Plant 1,000 Times More Efficient at CO2 Removal Than Photosynthesis Is Now Active

Precise carbon measurements indicate that peat is already being formed at the Volgermeerpolder near Amsterdam (NL), a toxic waste landfill site that was capped with foil with an artificial wetland on top. The new peat will offer an extra layer of protection against the poisonous and toxic waste in the future.

Initially, trains in the Netherlands were set to run entirely on renewable energy by 2018. However, it seems officials have been able to beat that goal by an entire year. As of the first of January this year, all public transport trains are being powered by renewable energy, namely from wind power.

You know just from using a laptop that computers give off a lot of excess heat. For data centers containing tens of thousands of servers, this is a big problem, wasting energy and money. To try and mitigate this, companies have experimented with moving facilities to near the Arctic Circle and even submerging servers underwater. But Dutch startup Nerdalize has a different approach. Rather than trying to dissipate excess energy from servers, it wants to harness it, using it to heat people’s homes instead.

Wastewater treatment plants have a PR problem: People don't like to think about what happens to the waste they flush down their toilets. But for many engineers and microbiologists, these plants are a hotbed of scientific advances, prompting their trade organization to propose a name change to "water resource recovery facility."

Researchers at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Biosustainability in Denmark have developed a method of producing P450 enzymes used by plants to defend against predators and microbes in bacterial cell factories. The process could facilitate the production of large quantities of the enzymes, which are also involved in the biosynthesis of active ingredients of cancer drugs.

Scientists are taking a leaf from the virus playbook. They’re devising vaccines and antiviral therapies that can spread from host to host. These transmissible vaccines will likely first be used in animals that carry diseases that can infect people. Some may use a weakened version of the virus, or attach a piece of the pathogen to a benign virus.

Increasing coffee consumption may help to stave off liver cancer, a new study has suggested. Researchers have found that people who drink more coffee are less likely to develop hepatocellular cancer (HCC), the most common form of primary liver cancer – and the effect was even found in decaffeinated coffee. Related: Starving prostate cancer with what you eat: Apple peels, red grapes, turmeric

Harvard medicine professor Ted Kaptchuk is at the bleeding edge of a radical new treatment in medicine: giving patients pills that don’t work. “Our patients tell us it’s nuts,” he says. “The doctors think it’s nuts. And we just do it. And we’ve been getting good results.”

Many people have suggested that addiction hijacks the body's natural drives in the service of compulsive drug use. A new study now suggests that hijacking another natural system in the brain may help overcome drug addiction. Published in Biological Psychiatry, the study shows that administration of oxytocin -- a naturally occurring molecule well known for its role in social bonding and childbirth -- reduces drug-seeking behavior in methamphetamine-addicted rats.

Thousands of people with severe depression could obtain urgent relief if experimental treatment using ketamine were made more widely available, medical experts say. Related: 'I can stop and breathe': the people taking ketamine for depression

Practicing meditation and other relaxation techniques can reduce cancer survivors’ fear that they will face a recurrence of the disease, a new study has shown. Related: The Role Of Yoga In Healing Trauma

Want to reset your biological clock? Try eating at a different time of day. New research suggests that shifting your meal time can also shift your body's internal clock, meaning that recovering from jet lag or adjusting to a shift-work schedule might be easier if you also adjust your eating times.

The tradition is said to had started in ancient Mesopotamia, as archaeologists had discovered three Akkadian tablets that date back to about 1750 BC, which described meals fit for a king.

We are all aware of similarities in words between different languages, and also how much some words vary between cultures separated both in time and location. Often it is the most common words in a language that retain a strong similarity to their origin languages: for instance, the English word brother and the French frère are derived from words in ancient languages: the Sanskrit bhr?tr and the Latin fr?ter. It is obvious, therefore, that the distinctive sound of a word can remain associated with the same meaning for thousands of years. But how far back in time can we go to find common words?

The Unfinished Obelisk is an ancient Egyptian obelisk located in Aswan. This obelisk is known for its massive size, as well as for the fact that the work that was carried out on it was never finished. Had the Unfinished Obelisk been completed, it would have been the largest obelisk ever constructed by the ancient Egyptians.

More than four decades ago, archaeologists uncovered the skeletal remains of three individuals within a tomb located near the small town of Vergina in Macedonia, Greece.

45,000 years ago, in an area that is now part of Ethiopia, humans found a roomy cave at the base of a limestone cliff and turned it into a special kind of workshop. Inside, they built up a cache of over 40 kilograms of reddish stones high in iron oxide. Using a variety of tools, they ground the stones into different colored powders: deep reds, glowing yellows, rose grays. Then they treated the powder by heating it or mixing it with other ingredients to create the world's first paint. For at least 4,500 years, people returned to this cave, known today as Porc-Epic, covering its walls in symbols and inking their bodies and clothes. Some anthropologists call it the first artist's workshop. Alt: Ochre use by Middle Stone Age humans in Porc-Epic cave persisted over thousands of years

In 1526, the Spanish conquistador Francisco de Montejo arrived on the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico and found most of the great Maya cities deeply eroded and unoccupied. Many generations removed from the master builders, engineers, and scientists who conceived and built the cities, the remaining Maya they encountered had degenerated into waring groups who practiced blood rituals and human sacrifice.

Artifacts left behind by ancient Americans suggest their civilization was much more advanced than experts previously thought. Some of those artifacts, found at a prehistoric settlement in Peru called Huaca Prieta, are 15,000 years old and include handwoven baskets, stone tools and what’s left of meals made from marine- and land-based foods, with burnt and cut bones that are signs of cooking with fire, a study in the journal Science Advances found. The items were found hidden “underneath a large human-made mound” that was built later.

The new center will differentiate itself from other marine archaeology programs because it won’t focus on shipwrecks. Instead, it will study human societies in coastal zones and adaptation processes to climate and environmental changes.

The remains of at least four female heads, made out of ceramic, have been discovered at the ancient town of Porphyreon, located in modern-day Jiyeh, Lebanon.

Our understanding of ancient history seldom changes in an instant, but when archaeologists unearthed a trade stamp from its resting place of 4,000 years on Sir Bani Yas Island, a stepping stone in the story of the Dilmun civilisation was uncovered.

Last week the Israel Antiquities Authority uncovered a well from the Ottoman period, several hundred years old, and an elaborate water system located nearby – as part of the work being carried out by the Netivei Israel Company in order to widen Highway 38 north of the main entrance to Ramat Bet Shemesh.

From above, it seems as though a series of holes were pierced in the desert’s dry surface. But a hundred feet below the mysterious pits, a narrow tunnel carries water from a distant aquifer to farms and villages that wouldn’t exist without it.

Restorers on Tuesday put the finishing touches on a seven-year restoration of two underground burial rooms at the Catacombs of Domitilla, which revealed long-hidden frescoes commissioned some 1600 years ago by the city’s bakers.

A unique ancient underground city has been brought to light in the Kayseri province of Turkey. Thanks to local residents and shepherds, 52 chambers have been added to the inventory of the country’s fascinating underground sites.

Istanbul's old city walls were constructed during the 5th century under the Roman Empire and still bear traces of ancient history 16 centuries later, encircling the old city and leaving historic marks on modern-day Istanbul.

In a step towards scientifically documenting all archaeological sites and monuments in Egypt, the Antiquities Documentation Centre (ADC) of the Ministry of Antiquities has started to document the Esna Temple south of Luxor and the Tanis archaeological site in the Sharqiya governorate in the Delta. The whole project to document all the archaeological sites in Egypt was also stopped in the aftermath of the 25 January Revolution due to budgetary problems. Al-Leithi said that the ministry had resumed the documentation project earlier this year and had started with the Esna Temple and the Tanis site.

Scientists are now confident animal life on solid ground started with a few short bursts of marine creatures making the leap from the oceans.

Scientists have extracted and analyzed DNA from mummies that are thousands of years old, and they have found that the ancient Egyptians are actually more genetically similar to people living today in the Near East — countries like Israel, Lebanon, and Syria — than modern-day Egyptians. Alt: The first genome data from ancient Egyptian mummies

We know little about Earth’s surface temperatures for the first 4 billion years or so of its history. This presents a limitation into research of life’s origins on Earth and also how it might arise on distant worlds as well.

An international group of researchers has discovered that the most ancient dinosaurs’ ancestors were quadrupedal. Dinosaurs emerged in Triassic, a geological period of the Mesozoic era which started 252 Mya. It was then when archosaurs split into two evolutionary branches – bird-like and crocodile-like.

Collagen is the key protein within bone that provides the flexibility in the skeleton and is intimately locked within the minerals that comprise bone. This ubiquitous material dominates both the archaeological and palaeontological record and can provide important information on both living and extinct organisms. However, the survival of collagen sequences beyond 3.5 million years old has not been achieved and validated by any other team.

The hunter-gatherers of Zhokhov Island were a hardy folk. Nine thousand years ago, they survived frigid year-round temperatures in animal-skin tents some 500 kilometers north of what is now the Russian mainland, and they were the only people ever known to hunt large numbers of polar bears without firearms. Now it appears these ancient Arctic dwellers did something even more remarkable: They may have been among the first humans to breed dogs for a particular purpose.

Few Americans probably know that their tax dollars paid to kill 76,859 coyotes in 2016. The responsible agency was Wildlife Services (WS), part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Its mission is to “resolve wildlife conflicts to allow people and wildlife to coexist.” This broad mandate includes everything from reducing bird strikes at airports to curbing the spread of rabies.

Thousands of voracious white maggots wiggle frenetically while tearing through trayfuls of leftover meat, vegetables and fruits in an unusual farm in southwestern China. It may not be a pretty sight, but the gluttonous larvae could help China eat away something far uglier: the country's mountain of food waste. Related: Cold conversion of food waste into renewable energy and fertilizer

To say that David Biello’s new book, The Unnatural World, is not uplifting would be an understatement. Its upshot is that we have seriously f—ed up this planet, along with all of the organisms and ecosystems residing on it, and the situation is likely to get much, much worse. But that's hardly news at this point. We are not the only species to have shaped the Earth’s environment. The only reason humanity could even arise is because microscopic single-celled proto-photosynthesizers used sunlight to split water and liberate oxygen, providing air for us animals to breathe. But we are the only species to knowingly alter the state of the entire globe, by continuously burning the corpses of earlier photosynthesizers.

Some have cast doubt about the existence of black hole event horizons from which nothing, not even light, can escape the gravitational pull. Another proposed alternative to event horizons is the “hard surface theory,” which suggests that matter within a black hole is destroyed by smashing into a solid surface.

Astronomers have watched as a massive, dying star was likely reborn as a black hole. It took the combined power of the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT), and NASA's Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes to go looking for remnants of the vanquished star, only to find that it disappeared out of sight.

A UCLA-led team has discovered a new way of probing the hypothetical fifth force of nature using two decades of observations at W. M. Keck Observatory, the world's most scientifically productive ground-based telescope. There are four known forces in the universe: electromagnetic force, strong nuclear force, weak nuclear force, and gravitational force. Physicists know how to make the first three work together, but gravity is the odd one out. For decades, there have been theories that a fifth force ties gravity to the others, but no one has been able to prove it thus far.

Talk about rocking the cradle. Sharp new images have identified a throng of newborn stars as the source of a fast radio burst. The discovery strengthens the idea that these brief pulses of radio waves arise from newly formed neutron stars, super-dense objects just 20 kilometres across.

KIC 8462852 (aka. Tabby’s Star) captured the world’s attention back in September of 2015 when it was found to be experiencing a mysterious drop in brightness. A week ago (on May 18th), it was announced that the star was at it again, which prompted observatories from all around the world to train their telescopes on the star so they could observe the dimming as it happened.

They discovered that every two and a half years, the light from this distant star - PDS 110 in the Orion constellation, which is same temperature and slightly larger than our sun - is reduced to thirty percent for about two to three weeks. "What's exciting is that during both eclipses we see the light from the star change rapidly, and that suggests that there are rings in the eclipsing object, but these rings are many times larger than the rings around Saturn,"

"Gale crater once held a lake with water that we would even have been able to drink, but we still don't know how long this habitable environment" endured, said Jens Frydenvang, a scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory and the University of Copenhagen. " What this finding tells us is that, even when the lake eventually evaporated, substantial amounts of groundwater were present for much longer than we previously thought

Antimatter is rare in this Universe, but the Universe is a pretty big place, so even small quantities can add up fast. In our galaxy alone, there's a steady bath of radiation that indicates positrons are constantly running into their electron anti-partners and annihilating them. Alt: How most antimatter in the Milky Way forms: Mystery solved

For a brief time during its infancy, Earth was not a planet. It was a hot, doughnut-shaped blob called a synestia. Rocky worlds can be pulverised by collisions with each other, mushrooming into synestias before cooling off and becoming more familiar-looking celestial spheres, a new study says. Alt: Scientists Propose a New Kind of Planet: A Smashed Up Torus of Hot Vaporized Rock

It has now been a year since NASA successfully expanded a habitat attached to the International Space Station, the experimental Bigelow Expandable Activity Module. Initial tests on the module suggest that expandable habitats may play an important role as NASA considers how best to expand human activity into deep space.

Brazilian physicists have made a significant observation that expands our understanding of an unusual phenomenon called blackbody force. This new research could help us refine our models of how planets and stars are formed.

The growing amount of fast-moving space debris orbiting the Earth could lead to catastrophic collisions with satellites, hurting economies, researchers warned Wednesday ahead of a summit to coordinate efforts to remove the junk.

Plastic. There should be hundreds of thousands of tonnes of the stuff floating around in our oceans. But we are finding less than expected – perhaps because living organisms are evolving the ability to break it down. Alt: Newly-Evolved Microbes Could Be Eating 90% of Ocean Plastic

The Great Barrier Reef can no longer be saved by existing plans to protect the ecological site, experts have warned, saying that efforts should shift to a lesser, backup plan of maintaining the reef's "ecological function" instead. Related: Coral Reef Tourism is worth $36 Billion to the Travel Industry and Host Nations Every Year

A team of researchers from Sweden, Denmark and Finland has conducted field experiments that offering evidence that suggests permafrost melting in the Arctic could release major amounts of nitrous oxide into the atmosphere. Related: Here's a Mind-Melting Snapshot of What Earth Will Look Like in 1 Billion Years Related: In Year 1 Million, What Will Humanity Look Like?

A “faceless” deep-sea fish not seen for more than a century has been rediscovered by scientists trawling the depths of a massive abyss off Australia’s east coast, along with “amazing” quantities of rubbish.

Research based on more than 180 fossil insects preserved in the La Brea Tar Pits of Los Angeles indicate that the climate in what is now southern California has been relatively stable over the past 50,000 years.

Tohoku University researchers and their international collaborators have identified a possible genetic mechanism underlying the evolution of birds, according to a recently published study in Nature Communications.

A new species of a fossil pliosaur (large predatory marine reptile from the 'age of dinosaur') has been found in Russia and profoundly change how we understand the evolution of the group, says an international team of scientists.

Ancient tooth fossils found in Europe may represent a new chapter in the human origin story. The fossils, which date back more than 7 million years, belonged to an ape-like creature named Graecopithecus freybergi, researchers hypothesized in two new papers. A lower jaw bone and upper premolar were found in Greece and Bulgaria, respectively.

Recent archaeological evidence indicates that between 130,000 to 100,000 years ago there was an exit of anatomically modern humans out of Africa into the Americas and Eastern Eurasia. This view is supported by the discovery of African artifacts in the Middle East, Brazil, and Crete, and 80,000-100,000-year-old human teeth in China. The findings suggest that humans left Africa much earlier than originally believed.